Watching the Kennedy assassination video over and over again in class on Friday started to give me a different outlook on what Don DeLillo's doing in Libra. It brought me back to the scene where Nicholas Branch is being sent things like warped bullets and shattered bones, and he thinks:
I still feel that way to some degree, but watching the assassination video so many times really drove home the, "This is what it looks like to get shot," idea for me because we literally were just watching a man get shot. By the time we'd seen the clip three or four times, I started to wonder why any of the conspiracy theories mattered; at the end of the day, it was a video of our president being killed, and anything someone might notice and use to jump-start some crazy theory should ultimately be a secondary detail.
Thus, while I'm hesitant to say it doesn't matter at all what the real story was behind the assassination, I feel much more aligned with the people who sent Branch the bloody goat heads and shattered bones. You can study the intricacies of the JFK assassination, but when you boil it all down, it will always be the story of a man's death. That may not be all there is to it, but isn't that all that matters? Regardless of the what kind of plotting you think led up to the assassination, doesn't it all add up to the same thing? Won't the Zapruder film always end in exactly the same way?
I guess, though, this kind of thinking leads to a very cynical view of history because if we never let ourselves dig deeper into tragedies, there'd hardly be anything for historians to study at all. Yet, I still think it's a worthwhile thing to keep in mind. It's certainly made me feel differently about Libra; where I was once intrigued by the complex web of coincidences making up DeLillo's plot, I now sort of wonder why it even matters. Watching the assassination video over and over again is like, "Yes, this is what is looks like to get shot," and it starts to seem ridiculous that we'd ever consider focusing on any other aspect of the event.
The bloody goat heads seem to mock him. He begins to think this is the point. They are rubbing his face in the blood and gunk. They are mocking him. They are saying in effect, "Here, look, these are the true images. This is your history. Here is a blown-out skull for you to ponder. Here is a lead penetrating bone."Originally when I read this passage, I was inclined to side with Branch and think that the contradictions and ambiguities are still extremely important, even if the end result of the plot will always stay the same. Juliana and I led class on the day that we talked about this reading and it seemed like most people felt the same way—that even though the only truly concrete thing we can ever know about the JFK assassination is that it ended with our president getting shot, it's still worth our while to study its history and try to make some more sense of it.
They are saying, "Look, touch, this is the true nature of the event. Not you beautiful ambiguities, your lives of the major players, your compassions and sadnesses. Not your roomful of theories, your museum of contradictory facts. There are no contradictions here. Your history is simple. See, the man on the slab. The open eye staring. The goat head oozing rudimentary matter."
They are saying, "This is what it looks like to get shot." (DeLillo 299-300)
I still feel that way to some degree, but watching the assassination video so many times really drove home the, "This is what it looks like to get shot," idea for me because we literally were just watching a man get shot. By the time we'd seen the clip three or four times, I started to wonder why any of the conspiracy theories mattered; at the end of the day, it was a video of our president being killed, and anything someone might notice and use to jump-start some crazy theory should ultimately be a secondary detail.
Thus, while I'm hesitant to say it doesn't matter at all what the real story was behind the assassination, I feel much more aligned with the people who sent Branch the bloody goat heads and shattered bones. You can study the intricacies of the JFK assassination, but when you boil it all down, it will always be the story of a man's death. That may not be all there is to it, but isn't that all that matters? Regardless of the what kind of plotting you think led up to the assassination, doesn't it all add up to the same thing? Won't the Zapruder film always end in exactly the same way?
I guess, though, this kind of thinking leads to a very cynical view of history because if we never let ourselves dig deeper into tragedies, there'd hardly be anything for historians to study at all. Yet, I still think it's a worthwhile thing to keep in mind. It's certainly made me feel differently about Libra; where I was once intrigued by the complex web of coincidences making up DeLillo's plot, I now sort of wonder why it even matters. Watching the assassination video over and over again is like, "Yes, this is what is looks like to get shot," and it starts to seem ridiculous that we'd ever consider focusing on any other aspect of the event.
Note that the stuff about bloody goat skulls filled with Jello, however, were all laboratory attempts to reproduce the effects of bullets at certain trajectories on the human skull--they were specifically part of an effort to "reconstruct" the shooting, to reveal the "real story" from the pieces of flesh and bone. The people who send this stuff to Branch aren't "really" mocking him, although he starts to feel that way--this is the kind of stuff that serves as "evidence" in this particular history and it has *everything* to do with the conspiracy ideas: to "show" whether three bullets from the rear could do what the film shows them doing to Kennedy's skull. There's no escaping the pull of underlying narrative!
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